This initiative came out of the government’s Green Paper which seeks to rebalance the relationship between social housing tenants and their landlords by looking at issues such as complaints procedures, transparency and accountability.
This sits very well with one of our core values of being customer focused.
Working with a customer group we are now looking at the six core commitments which make up the Together with Tenants charter.
Suzanne Brown, our Executive Director of Operations said: “It’s so important that tenants have the opportunity to contribute to how we make sure that the charter becomes part of our everyday activities.
“As an early adopter of the Together with Tenants charter we will continue to work collaboratively with the NHF to promote opportunities for tenants to get involved.”
Feedback from the consultation process in April helped shape the six-point charter.
Latest activity
The customer group is looking in more detail at these commitments, and to explore how we could measure our performance on delivering them.
The group met for the first time at our Exeter office on 21 November and the key themes that came from this useful session centred around a fundamental need for trust to be built and maintained. This included:
- clear expectations on both sides
- doing what we say we will do and when we say we will do it
- knowing our customers, having up to date information, and if we don’t know – we ask
- listening to what our customers tell us and valuing it.
- making sure our colleagues are empowered and trained to deliver high quality service.
To demonstrate the delivery of the Charter we must include measures of meaningful engagement, genuine listening, valuing what we are told and acting accordingly to deliver on our promises.
We will feed this back to the NHF and the group will meet again in January to agree a framework of what we do and look at ways that the Charter can be promoted to the wider customer population.
Look out for more news about the charter and Together with Tenants over the coming months.